Sales Tips

I bet you already have a long list of launch announcements and product training sessions for your 2013 sales kickoff. That’s important information, but it’s not enough.

If your sales people are still having difficulty engaging executive and business audiences, even after that expensive solution selling training you invested in so recently, it’s because they lack a good alternative to the product-centric pitch.

Executive audiences – whether IT or Business – don’t need your sales people to recite widely-known industry trends as an intro to the product pitch. They don’t want to waste a meeting hearing information they could just as easily find on your website.

They DO want

To see that you understand their business, in-depth

To hear new insights about how to apply technology to grow their business

To experience what it’s like to collaborate with your company

To be able to justify their decision to work with you

That means your sales people need a new arsenal. Here are some changes you can make in time for Sales Kickoff:

State a point of view. Give Sales something unique to say that customers haven’t heard from everyone else: Make some bold statements, show a distinct approach, or share a new perspective. Challenge common knowledge or the status quo.

Tell Stories. Replace recitations of product benefits with use case-drivenvalue stories. Provide sales people with stories that illustrate how you have helped similar companies (and will help them) create tangible business results within specific use cases by leveraging your unique capabilities.

Brainstorm. Turn sales meetings into collaborative brainstorming sessions by enabling sales people to discuss many options and approaches, point out the pros and cons of each, and explain how they fit with other products the customer is likely to need.

In their quest to solve business problems, buyers are turning to the internet and social media for information. This customer-driven Buyers’ Journey gives marketers a new channel to create valuable information that is discoverable, consumable, shareable and valuable.

Unfortunately, many marketers fall into the trap of creating content flooded with buzzwords, jargon, and marketing pitches. These cause buyer resistance and make you indistinguishable from competitors.

1. Don’t lead with your solution, your product or what you do. Instead start with a narrative about the business problem you are solving. Have a vision. Then lead your reader to your solution. Show how your approach is different before you go on to prove how it is better.

2. To craft the story, listen to your customers. Find out how your customers describe what you do. What words and phrases resonate with them—and which ones do not? See my previous post for how to interview customers about their buyers’ journey to get this information.

3. Listen to how your top sales performers tell your story. This will give you added perspective—particularly from those with strong solution-selling techniques.

4. When you write, ‘speak’ with a natural voice. Use the words you would use if you were speaking to someone you knew. Use short phrases and sentences. Most times, less is more. It just takes extra work to edit things down.

5. Strive to say something relevant, memorable, and different from what your competitors are saying. Just keep it real and not overblown. Be careful not to over-claim. Puffed up claims put most readers off rather than draw them in and can end up being a legal challenge later if problems arise. Make your reader want to learn more – and show them how they can by having additional content for them to pursue elsewhere on your website or blog.

Released last year and written by lexophile Arthur Plotnik, “Better than Great” is a book I have found useful in fixing buzzword bingo. It reads like a funky thesaurus and includes an assortment of over 6000 words and suggestions for describing things—pulling from rare gems, vintage gold, and even phrases influenced by hip hop to present a wide range of fresh superlatives. It is both amusing and vocabulary expanding.

Share with us successful ways on how you are telling your company’s story in a way that genuinely informs buyers, stands out from the crowd and avoids buzzword bingo.

Over the last five years, B2B selling has evolved from general concepts of solution selling to the ‘Buyer’s Journey’ – a journey driven by the large amount of information available online. A new sales and marketing reality is rapidly emerging as the internet plays an increasing role in buyer research. I’ve seen the impact of this in my own marketing work, and I strongly believe we are on the cusp of some important changes to the conventional marketing and sales wisdom of the past

Studies are consistently showing that B2B buying habits are shifting. Buyers are now 60-70% of the way through the buyer’s cycle before they reach out to your sales representative. By that time, there is less need for traditional solution selling techniques. In the new buyer’s journey, the buyers believe that, based on their own research, they have figured out what they need. When they decide to contact your sales team, they have most likely decided you are one of their top three choices – you are 1 of 3.

Maybe this sounds like good news. It’s not. Most often the buyer views all three choices as equally acceptable, and the final decision comes down to features, functions, support—and price, price, price. Exceptional sales representatives might be able to overcome this ‘1 of 3’ syndrome, but this is the antithesis of where you want to be with solution selling.

In this new selling environment your biggest hurdles are no longer your competitors or features and functions; they are:

The ability of buyers to learn on their own

How your company participates in that learning process

As the CMO of SAP, Jonathan Becher, said at a recent Churchill Club CMO Panel, “Being marketed TO is a mindset we need to end. It’s helping (the buyer) discover what they want to learn about.”

Are you experiencing this phenomenon? Has it changed your marketing strategy?

Last time, I wrote about top sales resources. Case studies were at the top of the list. That’s because in multiple sales surveys, including our own study of industry-focused go-to-market efforts, case studies come out as the most effective sales tool.

Getting a customer to put their name on a case study is a big effort. Make sure the case studies you produce create the greatest possible impact. Here’s how:

Relevant – Create them for every industry you pursue, and make it easy and fast to find them by industry.

Audience-appropriate. Write business-focused studies to be sued with senior, line-of-business audiences. Write technical ones describing relevance of features and specific.

Quantitative – Include actual numbers to describe everything from how long a deployment took, to improvements in key metrics, to financial benefits, and ROI. Not only do numbers impress, they provide a level of credibility that fuzzy, buzzword-heavy marketing speak just can’t.

Multimedia – Enable customers to learn about other customers via multiple mediums. Printed summaries are great leave-behinds at meeting and trade shows, but a 2 minute video of a customer speaking has much more impact on the web or embedded into a presentation.

Brand-heavy – If you only focus on a single case study, make it one from a highly recognized name, ideally in the industry you are targeting.

When President Kennedy announced the goal of putting Americans on the moon, no one had any idea how to do it. Not even the Russians, who had inspired the race with their ventures into orbit, understood how to get to the moon. Yet Kennedy got us there. He used the sheer confidence of his belief to convince Americans that the moon was an attainable objective. He then dedicated extensive resources to enable the scientists and engineers in the effort to achieve it.

There is a lesson here for sales organizations. Setting big goals at a sales kickoff and barraging reps with information about the newest products just isn’t enough. The top reps will deliver the numbers in any case. The rest will struggle without extensive resources and support.

Sales reps report that the following are especially effective in helping them achieve their targets:

In-account deal support from subject-matter, industry, or technology specialists. This is especially critical in larger companies, where account managers must be relationship experts, but cannot possibly know the details of every product, business process, or industry (unless they are vertically-aligned). The very fact of bringing in an expert who is perceived as more senior by the customer is often enough to move a deal forward.

Business-level messaging and sales tools targeted at the high-level decision makers and budget holders. These should complement detailed product-focused content, which is necessary but insufficient bu itself. Business messaging targets the audience evaluating the investment rather than the people evaluating your product.

Training & tools that enable sales reps to ask great questions and have intelligent conversations with customers at multiple organizational levels and functional roles. Asking great questions accomplishes three critical things: Positions the sales person as an ally and advisor, demonstrates that they can listen, and provides valuable information about the customers that can guide the rep in structuring the deal.

Quantitative results achieved for other customers. While compliments (customer testimonials that discuss how easy you are to work with) are good, hard numbers about specific improvements they achieved are always more powerful. Numbers in the elevator pitch get attention and meetings, and numbers in the business case help close the deal.

I just watched a great TED presentation by Dan Pink on the science of motivation. The net is that rewards work well for very simple tasks that require no creativity. They actually produce worse performance for complex tasks requiring insight, creativity, and innovation. What works for the latter, according to Dan Pink, in intrinsic motivation created by autonomy, mastery, and purpose in people’s jobs.

How much of these three does the typical B2B enterprise sales rep have? Some autonomy in terms of work hours and location. But not much in terms of processes, procedures, reporting, pricing, etc…

Mastery? Everyone is moving to “self-paced learning,” which means you watch a video or presentation on your PC while multitasking. What kind of in-depth, hands-on education can you really get that way? Hardly the best way to teach negotiation, interviewing and discovery, listening, rapport-building, solution design, or anything else that’s truly core to a complex sale into a large account.

Purpose? (Other than the commission?) I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve heard sales and corporate management say, “the reps are coin-operated.” Create a spiff, and get the result. True. You get SOME result. But what if instead of a spiff (or in addition to one), you convinced your reps that what they are selling is meaningful, significant, and really matters? That they have to be the sages and advisors who will help customers save their companies? That meeting the quota isn’t about going to “Club,” but about saving or creating jobs and livelihoods for others?

Maybe sales reps don’t operate by the same rules as all other humans. But I doubt it. Would love to know for sure. Anyone out there who’s tried something other than a spiff to motivate sales?

Let’s face it. Sales can generate revenue without Marketing. Not so in reverse. The true purpose of marketing – of the messages, and the programs, and the collateral, and the PR – is to accelerate and amplify sales efforts. When that’s forgotten, sales-marketing misalignment follows.

Companies focus lots of attention on understanding customer needs, designing messages and programs for them, and gathering feedback to improve products and go-to-market efforts. Unfortunately, when Marketers forget what marketing is for, they often neglect their other, one might even argue primary, audience: Sales. (To clarify, by “Sales” I mean both direct and indirect channels, so partners are definitely included in this discussion.)

You probably have a process in place to measure customer satisfaction and gather customer input. Whether via survey, customer advisory board, or support call analysis, some form of customer feedback is influencing your business. What feedback mechanism do you have in place for the Sales team?

Here are five simple ideas to help understand Sales’ needs and align Sales and Marketing:

1. Conduct an annual sales survey. Just like a customer satisfaction survey, this tool can assess current perceptions, determine needs, and prioritize their importance. Use a survey to find out what tools, information, and skills will improve sales productivity, and to assess how well various marketing organizations are supporting and collaborating with Sales.

2. Gather input through your sales and partner portals. Create a visible and easily accessible request form and encourage Sales to ask for tools, training, content, information, or other changes that will help them accelerate and close deals. Then use your existing sales and partner communications to highlight requests that have been implemented.

3. Create sales and partner advisory boards. Be sure to select a diverse set of members. This group can be a sounding board for new initiatives or programs such as Sales Kickoff agendas, improvements to product launches, or training curricula.

4. Place Marketing and Sales in the same room. The most effective marketing people are those that spend time out in the field, accompanying reps to sales meetings and listening to partners. You can’t regularly send everyone in marketing out into the field, but you can provide opportunities for greater interaction. Send marketing people to sales training, where they can see what sales is learning, and build relationships and hear feedback directly from their classmates. Have marketing folks who are involved in lead-gen and sales enablement activities participate in sales meetings and calls, so they can hear the issues and challenges Sales faces, and play a more direct role in helping overcome them.

5. Plan together. During your annual planning process, ask Sales and Marketing executives to identify specific dependencies on each other. The leadership team should then acknowledge each dependency, and jointly make decisions about whether and how each organization will fulfill their obligations to the other groups that depend on them. They should also agree on changes to the plan if the obligations can’t be met. Such collaboration early and at the highest levels of leadership permeates through both groups. (Of course, the same process should be used for the entire executive staff, not only the Sales and Marketing leaders.)

Happy to see that collaborative selling approaches are becoming popular, and now insightful companies like XPlane and WhiteBoard Selling are helping sales reps get more interactive and collaborative. That can only translate into greater customer relevance, and more productive and valuable sales meetings.

I’m amazed how often I ask enterprise sales reps about how the product they just sold will be used, and they don’t know!

Understanding the use-case for your product is essential to making the sale. If your sales reps can’t answer the following questions, then they don’t understand the customer and they can’t be relevant nor articulate your value and uniqueness.

Why is the customer purchasing?

What initiatives, objectives, or pressures is the company responding to via this and related purchases and actions? What’s at stake for each participant in the purchase decision?

How will the product be used?

Which business processes will it be involved in? Who will the users be? How will it change people’s day-to-day jobs? What performance and business metrics will it impact? How will it change your customer’s customers’ experiences?

What’s the context?

What other systems, processes, and business areas will your product interact with? What else is going on within the company that will determine the value of what you’re selling?

Your sales reps need to know how your customers think about their customers. How educated are they about this? Everyone gets product training, but other desperately needed enterprise sales education topics are neglected. Here are a few:

Listening skills

Customers’ industries, business processes, and critical business metrics